Early morning: Awoke and began attending to self. Felt very dark, seemingly because of some events of yesterday: (a) I'd attended to self throughout workday, but still left work feeling "bad" that I hadn't achieved what I'd wanted. (b) I then felt very angry when I arrived at my psychotherapy appt. with T, and didn't feel safe to express it, probably because he'd missed our last appt. and was now going away for 3 weeks. (c) I'd asked T for advice regarding my relationship with Z, but all his suggestions sounded like things I'd tried before with Z and other women friends, things that felt really unpleasant and led to escalating fear/anger. (d) I asked T what to do when my inner work leads to memories of being utterly helpless, hopeless, and angry, unable to get what I wanted from Mom. I said I was doubting whether it was good to return to that state over and over again. He said it was probably better not to keep going there, but instead to offer myself holding or to think of what it would feel like to get what I wanted from him. These options didn't sound appealing. (e) I felt compelled to have sex last night when I didn't really want to. Toward the end, I noticed horror stories coming to mind about letting myself be used, but pushed them aside.
Feeling this dark, it did not feel interesting or nourishing to do inner child / trauma recovery work. It occurred to me that I could meditate instead! Practiced silent noting. After about 10 minutes, shifted into a state that felt quite equanimous. After about another 10 minutes, another shift into greater equanimity. Kept meditating for about another hour. Very pleasant. Am I in the equanimity stage of 2nd path?
10:49 am: An emotionally tumultuous morning. Interactions with Eric and Z. Good, but frequently painful. Wrote to A about genetic study. Brief conversation with Dad on phone. Now, settling into work.
11:10 Time to go down to P3 and meditate.
11:15 33 minutes silent noting. Not as equanimous as this morning. By the end of the session, I was checking the clock. Also, I felt a little sleepy. But very little sadness, fear, or anger. Mostly pressure, expanding, releasing, hearing, hearing, expanding, hearing, thinking, sleepiness, pressure, pulsing ...
12:10 Attending to self. Not much concentration. Not much going on. Peaceful.
12:30 Pulsing, pressure on right side of face. Slight nausea.
12:40 Impatience with interrupting myself. "I want to get this done, it will feel so good!" "But it won't. I wonder why you think it will?" "OK, what I mean is that it feels good to keep going." Did thought experiment: it's time to go home from work. "No!!! I want to stay here until I get the reward!" "What will the reward be?" "A big celebration because I've completed something shiny and wonderful that every single person admires, followed by a long, long recess."
1:56 Had a one-hour lunch with Eric at Veggie Grill, after finding that Thai Simple had gone out of business and Eric was irritated that the food trucks were no cheaper than restaurants (unlike the Mexican food trucks in California or Utah). Doing thought experiment: it's time to go home! Sadness!
2:16 "It's time to go home!" Anger! "Don't make me leave, I'm not done! I haven't finished! Don't take me away from here! Give me a chance! I can get it done! I want to finish loading these experiments, then get a nearly-complete draft of the cross-proteome analysis!!!" (impossible) ... wow, I didn't realize before that what I felt when leaving work was anger!
3:10 I am sad because I've not gotten any work done in the past hour. I've been waiting for mMap to finish running, and occasionally checking in by running mQuest on the files that are ready. The mQuest results look bad -- each file has just a few lines, or even just one line, and it's almost always a dummy peakgroup!
"It's time to go home!" "NO!!! Don't tell me I'm not good enough! I am good enough! Don't you dare say I'm not good enough!!!
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